Session 2. Every Rock Tells a Story

Learning Goals

During this session, you will have an opportunity to
build understandings to help you:

Appreciate that rocks are evidence of the
basic processes that have transformed the Earth over billions
of years

Describe the stories that fossils and layered
rocks tell

Understand some of the history behind the classification
of matter

Relate the positions of continents and ocean floors
to the overall structure of tectonic plates

Video Overview

Every rock has a story to tell if you know how to read
it. Within the unique composition and arrangement of materials
that compose
different rocks, you can find patterns that are evidence of the
processes that
formed them — processes that represent chapters in Earth’s
dynamic history. In this session we will focus on discerning
events in Earth's past from rock clues. This session begins a
multi-part investigation
into the kinds of stories rocks can tell.

Video Outline

What can an unusual rock structure tell us about Earth's
past? During this session, we join Dr. Carol de Wet as she investigates
rock pinnacles in a Pennsylvania quarry. Her investigation takes
us from
the quarry to the laboratory, and uncovers secrets embedded in
the rock that not only tell us about the geologic history of
the area, but ultimately provide evidence that supports a once-revolutionary
scientific theory that has forever changed our perception of
how the
Earth “works” — tectonic plate theory.

Dr. de Wet
models the use of observation and reasoning to decipher the clues
found in rocks, so that we can become better at interpreting
their stories. As we come to understand the story that the rock
pinnacles in the quarry tell us, we learn how sedimentary
rock forms.

Throughout the video we observe elementary school children’s
ideas as they are interviewed about rock formation. We also visit
Laurie Wicks’ third-grade class in Middletown, Delaware, and
watch the students conduct a fossil investigation. We listen as the
students
theorize about how fossils form and the kinds of rocks in which
fossils are likely to be preserved.